Of copyrights and copywrongs, a small essay:

Eldred and the Copyright Barons

...Disney has managed to use public domain material like Winnie the Pooh and Grimm's fairy tales to generate billions of dollars worth of new, copyrighted material. This is, in fact, exactly the sort of thing the public domain is supposed to facilitate. The irony, of course, is that now that Disney has built an empire based on the public domain, they have spent millions trying to ensure no one follows in their footsteps. Without the public domain, Disney wouldn't have made "Beauty and the Beast", "The Little Mermaid", "Cinderella" or "Tarzan", but now that they have, heaven forbid anyone someday do to them what they've done to Edgar Rice Burroughs and Hans Christian Anderson.